Social Question

What do you think are the three most important skills to surviving the Apocalypse are?

If you were only allowed three skills to take with you to enter the final days of earths survival what would they be and why? What skills would keep you alive the longest in hopes of holding out to help rebuild humanity? please don’t do the whole, I would just die because humanity caused such tragic blah, blah, blah. Where would you go? What would you do with your three skills?

I guess the term ‘skills’ is a little open. I should have asked, specialized skills…Anyway, since I didn’t I will take with me;

Cold weather farming skills.
Mountaineering.
Natural medicine.

I would head towards the mountains in Wyoming and build shelter on the West side of a mountain near a high altitude water source and a geothermal water source. I would start farming as soon as I could and start developing medicines as soon as I could. I would build escape shelters off the edge of a cliff for safety if attacked and I would rig landslides to prevent attacks. I would hope to partner with Angelina Jolie as Salt and begin to make babies for the future of Earths sake.

In broad categories, I start with making shelter, foraging for food, and purifying water. I’d add next trapping and fire making given the chance (hunting for subsistence is too much time and energy expenditure). This is what I teach as core skill sets in my survival skill classes.

The mental tool I teach to remember what order to meet needs is the rule of 3’s: you can live 3 hours (roughly) in inclement conditions (fire and shelter, including clothing), 3 days without water, three weeks without food. Adding to either end of that, 3 seconds without safety and three months without companionship.

Extreme fighting skills. If there are other fuckers out there, they’re probbaly gonna want to kill or rape me, just because they can.

Medical proficiency. People are bound to get hurt. Myself included. Gotta know how to handle it.

Supreme Comprehension of the Universe and Everything Beyond. I would probably want this skill in order to understand what really happened, why it did happen, and what to do to find conclusion. Running around like a vulture is all good, but I’d want to find the answer out of this.

If there isn’t an answer to it though…knowing how to siphon gasoline, or at least swim, is probbaly some skill I’d need for many random situations.

I was asking this because I’ve always thought the most important taught skills to have while growing up in the city are,
swimming, driving a stick-shift and fire starting.
My daughter and I were talking about it and she started in on the Zombies…I started talking about those of us left over from WW3. This question evolved from there.

@CaptainHarley After that year, if you hunt or trap, forage or garden, or whatever else, won’t you want to keep the surplus good, too? I was mostly thinking of it because I’m preparing to can a bunch of the heirloom pumpkin I grew.

Dehydrating is a better idea nutritionally, but some things just don’t taste the same, right? Canning destroys a lot of nutrition, so I haven’t gotten into it until recently. Dehydrating and fermenting are my favorites, personally.

Something everyone should know for long term survival skills is that fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi, when properly stored and fermented, last for years, maybe forever. The process also makes it probiotic and creates a lot of lactic acid, which can be good for your digestion. The biggest thing is making the container sterile before you fill it with the vegetables. And luckily, it’s easy to tell if the fermentation goes bad; a bad ferment smells like death!

(At the end of WW2, my father in law’s village had to live on cans of sauerkraut that the Germans had stored. Because of the scorched earth policy, the Nazis burned everything in Northern Norway as they retreated, but the tins of sauerkraut were stacked in a warehouse and the ones in the middle were fine. It was all they had until the Russians came and helped them. True story.)